Startup Fortune, September 14, 2020: Ever since Bitcoin’s peaked at $20,000 in 2017, the global cryptocurrency market began cooling off gradually with investors around the world wondering if the digital asset and its likes – also known as altcoins – are still worth investing. This begs the million-dollar question – where is crypto adoption at now?
Different blockchain protocols’ underlying crypto-assets provide different utility, for example, Ethereum’s ETH can be used to pay for usage of smart contracts hosted on the network. However, all cryptocurrencies – as their name suggests – can be used as a form of value transfer or payments which is the reason the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was invented for.
Cryptocurrency payments are executed over a decentralized network which means the sender can freely send funds to anyone no matter where they are at without the need for a central authority – retaining full control of their assets without compromise to their privacy.
So why are cryptocurrencies not already used by the masses? Payment industry veterans suggest there are not enough crypto acceptance points to allow mainstream adoption of crypto payments due to three key reasons:
- Businesses often already have multiple systems to accept a variety of payments, such as credit cards and mobile wallets, and are not willing to take on another payment system to accept only crypto.
- Businesses are not willing to receive cryptocurrencies as settlement due to their volatile prices.
- Crypto payments have longer transaction time due to the need for confirmations over blockchain networks.
This may soon change as an up-and-rising blockchain decentralized finance (DeFi) project, Alchemy Pay, tackles these three critical barriers head-on. Alchemy Pay is a blockchain payments project that was founded in Singapore by a group of like-minded payment industry veterans hailing from payment and technology giants such as PayPal, Mastercard, UnionPay and ZhongAn Technology in a mission to solve the industry’s pain-points and drive crypto adoption.
After more than two years of intensive market research and product development, Alchemy Pay launched the world’s first hybrid fiat and crypto payment solutions which is an all-in-one system that can be deployed on all mainstream platforms such as point-of-sale systems, payment terminals, mobile devices, in-app and online payment gateways.
The multifunctional system is able to help businesses accept fiat, such as credit cards and mobile wallets, and a broad variety of cryptocurrencies with expedited transaction speeds by leveraging on-chain analysis to enable zero block confirmations and the integration of other second-layer scaling solutions such as lightning network. During settlement, merchants have the option to receive their payout in their local fiat currency to completely avoid any price volatility risks.
The game-changing solution, which effectively tackled the three aforementioned barriers, were met with enthusiastic responses from top industry players and has enabled Alchemy Pay to strike strategic partnerships with Shopify, an international $130 billion e-commerce giant, QFPay Group, Asia’s leading payment service provider with more than 1.2 million merchants, and Arcadier, SaaS leader serving more than 130 countries’ enterprises, amongst others.
Through these partnerships, Alchemy Pay gained access to over 2 million merchants across the globe and has already deployed its payment systems at over 3,000 touch points including world-renowned shoe and accessories retailer Aldo, Hong Kong’s largest home furnishing specialist Pricerite and Singapore’s iconic skybar CÉ LA VI, to name a few. Looking ahead, the company expects to rapidly on-board more businesses once the Corona pandemic situation improves.
The rising blockchain fintech star recently held its first-ever ACH token launch on one of the world’s top crypto exchanges, Huobi Global, which was met with a hugely positive response from the global crypto community and the project’s 100,000 supporters and followers across its social media channels.
The ACH token is expected to drive adoption of its payment services through an incentive mechanism that will reward ecosystem participants, from payment companies to merchants and buyers. In addition, the ACH token can be used to gain access to decentralized financial services, such as financing and investment, hosted on Alchemy Pay’s DeFi platform which was launched in August 2020.
Dubbed by many in the blockchain industry as the “connector of real-world transactions and cryptocurrencies”, Alchemy Pay may very well be the answer to the crypto adoption conundrum and the reason why you only need your crypto wallet for all your expenses, no matter where you are.
More details can be found at: https://www.alchemytech.io
